Posted originally on the CTH on December 3, 2022 | Sundance

For his weekly monologue UK pundit Neil Oliver discusses the insufferable misery of those who try to cancel Christmas.  Mr Oliver shares the importance of the meaning of Christmas in an eloquent and powerful manner.

The message is uplifting and needed, especially at such an uncertain time for so many around the world. We must never forget our Christian roots and how deeply humanity is connected to its history. YOU are the light he speaks of in the final sentence.  WATCH:

[Transcript] – For the second year in a row, the Christmas trees are going up early round my way. More and more households that would, in the world of before, have waited until the second or third week in December before decking the halls … have already gone the whole nine yards with the trees and twinkly lights. We are doing likewise in our house. I won’t lie … I love it. Every bit of it.

I love Christmas … always have and always will. In every conceivable way, Christmas is light in a time of darkness and for many of us, that light has never been more welcome and so can’t come soon enough.

Especially since the festival is once again under attack by the joyless division. In line with what has become a tradition of the season in benighted Britain, yet another bunch of interfering, patronizing preachers of the witless cant of “diversity and inclusivity” have decided it’s their turn to take a pop at Christmas.

Bristol-based Watch This Space – describing themselves as an Inclusion Consultancy … Heaven help us all … have scored some free publicity by calling on organisations to “rethink Christmas” on account of how all those of other faiths feel left out in December. I really don’t think those of other faiths feel left out at all. I am certain the vast majority of those of other faiths are perfectly fine with Christians enjoying Christmas … the same way I have no issue whatever with Diwali and Eid and the rest of the religious festivals that genuinely matter to those of faith … and that it is only those that could … and deliberately would … start a fight in an empty room that want to persuade everyone that Christmas is EX-clusive and only bad news.

For generations every school in Britain has put on a nativity play. The youngest among us are invited to play the parts of Mary and Joseph … the angel … the shepherds, the three wise men. In every school hall is recreated a scene from a village in the Middle East. The people being enacted by children are people of the Middle East. How inclusive and diverse, you might say.

It’s always Christianity that the nouveau bullies target – in the same that all bullies have always done – which is to say “single out the one that won’t hit you back.” The tolerance of Christianity and Christians has been a red rag to a bull – and for years it has been open season on Christmas on the utterly spurious grounds that someone somewhere might be offended by cards, carols and Santa Claus.

But hey – it’s only Jesus – worshipped by two and a half billion Christians as divine, the Son of God – so take up the slings and arrows and do your worst.

That latest call to cancel Christmas came hard on the heels of heresy – spiteful, childish mewling by a junior research fellow of Trinity College in Cambridge university about Jesus having, and I quote, “a trans body”. The sticky-palmed adolescent piffle was then backed up by the Dean of the college, so ensuring more headlines at the expense of followers of the world’s largest religion.

All of this latest mischief-making is just more of the same – which is to say the determination of the empowered elite systematically to remove every last foundation stone of Western civilisation … while simultaneously showing us … reminding us … who they think is boss. Having excited themselves by stripping away, under the egregious wrong of lockdown, so much of what it has meant to be human and alive in this part of the world, the usual suspects are determined to keep going until the job is done. Christianity, and the family, are still standing, and so the attacks must continue.

Lockdown was about draining the joy out of life, every last bit. It was about keeping people apart and alone. It was a relentless campaign of fear by authority figures who felt no fear themselves – because they knew there was nothing TO fear – and so broke all their own rules. Now it’s about bidding farewell to the very stuff of life – warmth in winter, nourishing food. Stop driving to save the world. Stop flying to save the world. How long before they come for the twinkly lights and crackers as well? The powers that be are about nothing less than making life dull and flat for we proles.

The truth is that none of this is to be taken lightly, far less ignored. The relentless erosion of Christmas, and Christianity itself, is essential for those whose mission it is to unmake Britain, and the west. It is nothing less than the deliberate snuffing out of the light of the world.

That anyone would ever seek to silence those who want to celebrate Christmas is beyond sinister in my eyes – because the story at the heart of Christmas is also the story at the heart of humanity and the best of human nature.

It is a simple story about a family – indeed the making of a family by the birth of a baby.

It is about a baby born into the most humble of circumstances, in a barn for animals, dependent upon the kindness of strangers.

Why would anyone of good and honest heart want to take issue with the simplicity of the family, and all that the family has meant and continues to mean? Except of course that the family is the ultimate obstacle for those intent on resetting the world – away from the human and in favour of the machine. Again, and again those who have it in mind to establish centralized, top-down control of populations have targeted the family as the final stumbling block in their path. Always, however, the family has prevailed, because the desire for family life is innately human.

The way things have been in the west for two thousand years is a direct and undeniable consequence of the overarching influence of Christianity. Our ethics, our morality, the laws by which we live, commitment to the sanctity of the individual … all are founded upon the Christianity of our forebears.

In more recent centuries deluded and dangerous people believed they had the wit and the power to set aside Christian ethics and morality and to replace them with their own ideologies. I invite you to consider the worst horrors of the 20th century and notice how well those experiments went. 150 million dead and counting.

What is being inflicted on us now is the death of a thousand cuts. One thing after another reminding us of who and what we are … where we came from … and why … is being debased, devalued, rewritten or erased by others who think they know better. Our heritage, our history, our culture, our society, our communities, our identities as men and women, as sovereign individuals … all of it is being undone, taken away, memory holed. This is deliberate and must be resisted at all costs.

Friedrich Nietzsche was among the most articulate to lament the death of God in the west:

God is dead and we have killed him – he wrote – who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”

And there’s the rub, prophesied by a philosopher 140 years ago … the coming of those idealogues of today – who talk of hacking humans, growing babies outside the body of the woman, of mixing humans with technology – who really do believe the time has come for them to assume the power of gods.

Worst of all of the anti-human behavior is the turning upon children, the exploitation of those most vulnerable and deserving of our protection. I don’t mean to imply this behavior is anything new – rather, it is simply more blatant and shameless. We catch glimpses of the danger – most recently in the ad campaign by fashion house Balenciaga that set tiny children in sexual contexts – and we dismiss such threats at our ultimate peril. From drag queen story time to questionable sex education in classrooms, the normalization of the sexualization of children is well under way. For those in search of a hill to die on, might not the defence of the innocence of children be the one?

The Christmas story is fundamentally about hope. For human beings there can be no greater gift or reason for hope than the birth of a child. There can be no greater imperative than the urge to protect that child, all children … against all threats.

During lockdown, rules were put in place to keep families apart, to separate children from grandparents. They are still pushing their jabs on children. Attempts were even made at that time to cancel Christmas – not that me and mine paid them a blind bit of notice. Faith leaders not worthy of the name complied with diktats that closed churches and so denied needful people access to the comfort and sustenance of holy places when they were most wanted.

I keep mentioning the thousands of people who have written to me during the past two, getting on for three years. In the run up to last Christmas, the emotion of it all was almost overwhelming. My family and I received piles of Christmas cards from families across Britain and around the world. Messages of love, solidarity and determination from people who might otherwise have been strangers to us, but who needed to share Christmas and so shared it with us, the joy of the Christmas message in what might otherwise have been an unremittingly dark time.

Over and over, we were reassured by all those – the majority of the senders in fact – who, like us, had identified a fight between good and evil … between light and dark. We were left in no doubt, by letter after letter, and card after card that the medicine that kept those people well – in every way that really mattered – was their faith in something bigger than themselves, something transcendent.

The central message of Christianity is so simple it can be summed up in a single line:

For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son … so that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life.

Has there ever been a more hopeful message? Believe … or don’t believe … but the Christmas story is undeniably a message of hope and family and love, and about the arrival in the darkness of a bright and warming light. It is worth remembering that the light is always there, even if it is out of sight.

I think about the words that, according to the legend at least, were scratched into the wall of a basement by someone hiding from tyranny during World War II. I believe in the sun even when it is not shining. I believe in love even when I do not feel it. I believe in God, even when he is silent.

In the northern latitudes people have sought light in the darkness of winter since a time beyond the reach of memory. Millennia before the coming of Christianity there were fires kindled and lamps kept lit in defiance of the dark and cold. Always the promise, held in human hearts, that with patience and fortitude they would see the return of the sun.

This year the dark and the cold are being deliberately intensified by the stated objectives of our so-called leaders. We are told we must have less light, less warmth. We are told these are among the prices we must pay … to win a war … to save the planet … Now is the time to kindle lights and keep them lit.

Forty years before the birth of Christ, the pagan Roman poet Virgil wrote lines about the birth of a boy, a Saviour, who would grow up to be divine and save the world. Virgil has been seen by some as a prophet predicting the birth of Jesus. He was sensing the rising of the son from beyond the horizon. Virgil’s poem, written around 38 BC, is a message of hope, of the inevitable and imminent coming of light into a darkened world.

Here’s the thing: we need Christmas, and the hope and joy of Christmas, more now than ever.

Light whatever lights you can – even the glow of a single candle can be seen for miles.

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